Update upon another viewing in 2017:
Is El Topo pointless then? Or rather, is it depoliticized? Or is chaos and ambiguity political and purposeful in an age of order? Simultaneously earthy and beyond the grave, the characters of El Topo do not effuse logic or purpose or even desire, but they do implode with the chaos of uncertainty, of the crushing weight of their totemic status as archetypical figures bounded by unclarifiable laws of desire and need and want they are unable to do anything about. They wander through a mass of centrifugal emptiness, never for or to or from anything; such liberal teloses hold no sway in this anti-rationalist mindspace that reveals, conclusively because of how vague and inconclusive it is, how arbitrary various masculine desires are. Or rather, how a life governed by the compulsion to complete goals is so often defined through the runaway assumptions of capitalist conclusiveness where one finishing line is the starting pace for an even faster act of running in circles. Most Westerns create male spaces of desire, empty and virginal worlds ready to be deflowered by a male character’s conquering, ordering phallic motion through space linking the edits and giving reason to this world. A contrapuntal riposte, there’s nothing to fill up in El Topo, nothing to complete, no oasis of purpose to stretch thinly across the randomness of the world in hopes of masquerading. In this sense, if the film dodges conventional meaning or any normative point, it also explodes the oppressive certainty of a social order which bounds and demarcates meaning to that which can be conventionally construed through only that order’s logic.
Original review:
Writing about Mulholland Dr. recently, I began with an explication on the film’s wonderful arbitrariness, its cluster of contrarian images and sounds which existed for no reason other than to bemuse and titillate, to enrage and befuddle, and to please David Lynch. I then spent most of the review coming to terms with the fact that my opening paragraph, all praise for Lynch’s film existing for the sake of itself, wasn’t really fair: the director’s 2001 anti-film does nothing simply for the sake of itself, for it had more to say about film as an object of corporate culture and voyeuristic gaze than any film of its decade. It is not an arbitrary film; it is replete with intentional, textured meaning, and it is a masterpiece of commentary on film as object of invention and sociology.
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David Lynch knows his way around a controversy, and if he is often contrarian for contrarian’s sake, knocking him for this does a huge disservice to the simple beauty of the act of being contrarian. It denies the cantankerous danger and dreamy nightmare-like quality of something that is so elementally arbitrary, so devoid of meaning, so ruthlessly anti-sensical. It does a disservice to the idea that something can simply exist for itself and the joy of being itself. It is in this region, despite all his other narrative pretensions and the very real sense of specific, pointed, subversive purpose to each and every shot in each of his films, where David Lynch skulks about. His films do not really exist purely for their own sake – there is a clear through-line and object of critique in each of his films, but they come closer to pure lunacy, to pure invention for invention’s sake, than almost any director since the era of silent film. In the world of today, if we limit ourselves to American directors, he has more to say about how film is made, and how images and sounds move beyond theme and story and into pure effect, than any other director. He’s having a hell of a lot more fun than anyone else while he’s at it too.
It’s not a new point to discuss David Gordon Green’s sellout hackwork middle career stage, but his recent “return to his roots” phase is fresher still and only recently of this Earth; thus, it provides a far more welcome object of inquiry. The hackwork phase has been written about on end, and while I happen to think Pineapple Express is a fairly nuanced redirecting of Green’s trademark hush for the purposes of a stoner comedy, there’s nothing more to be said about his duo of 2011 misfires. Far more interesting are his recent efforts, epitomized by his 2013 release Joe. Many have taken to considering it a return to form, and while the film is strong and textured in many exciting ways, I cannot join the train. Owing more to post-Green works like Winter’s Bone, his recent films retain the social realism of his earlier works but run dangerously close to recreating the trees at the expense of the forest. The honest characters and hard-hitting drama mostly follow through, but the poetic post-Malick haze and thoughtful melancholy of Green’s abstracted reflection of everyday human activity has been lost to time. 
Edited
With Michael Mann’s Blackhat underwhelming critics all around the land, I’ve decided to take a look back at the neon nightscape urban painter’s greatest film, a shockingly underrated work of crime fiction with an impressionist tint. From 1981, Michael Mann’s Thief. 
Edited Mid-2015
That Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 film Stranger by the Lake (French: L’Inconnu du lac) has been taken up by some as an erotic thriller in many circles is a most curious designation. Sure, there’s a surfeit of nudity in the film and the entirety of its emotional arc hinges on the relationship between sex and death (the defining characteristic of erotic thrills), but it is not the least bit erotic. Furthermore, it does not for a second pretend to be erotic (in contrast to many erotic thrillers are not erotic out of failure of execution even when they intend to be so).
Blue Ruin
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
